In the 1980s, philosophical, historical and social studies of science underwent a change which later evolved into a turn to practice. Analysts of science were asked to pay attention to scientific practices in meticulous detail and along multiple dimensions, including the material, social and psychological. Following this turn, the interest in scientific practices continued to increase and had an indelible influence in the various fields of science studies. No doubt, the practice turn changed our conceptions and approaches of science, but (...) what did it really teach us? What does it mean to study scientific practices? What are the general lessons, implications, and new challenges? This volume explores questions about the practice turn using both case studies and theoretical analysis. The case studies examine empirical and mathematical sciences, including the engineering sciences. The volume promotes interactions between acknowledged experts from different, often thought of as conflicting, orientations. It presents contributions in conjunction with critical commentaries that put the theses and assumptions of the former in perspective. Overall, the book offers a unique and diverse range of perspectives on the meanings, methods, lessons, and challenges associated with the practice turn. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION My underlying concern in this work is with the sociological analysis and description of members' practical activities and their practical ...

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

The biofuel boom is placing enormous demands on existing cropping systems, with the most crucial consequences in the agri-food sector. The biofuel industry is responding by initiating private governance and certification. The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Cramer Commission, among others, have formulated criteria on “sustainable” biofuel production and processing. This article explores the legitimacy of private governance and certification by the biofuel industry, highlighting opportunities and challenges. It argues that the concept of output based legitimacy is (...) problematic in the case of biofuel as long as no consensus or commonly agreed “best” solution has been established on what sustainable biofuel production is. Furthermore, it shows that the private governance initiatives analyzed fail to adequately include actors from developing countries. Finally, the article argues that we need mechanisms for control and accountability in order to guarantee that the political output of biofuel certification serves the common welfare. (shrink)

Are idioms stored in memory in ways that preserve their surface form or language or are they represented amodally? We examined this question using an inci- dental cued recall paradigm in which two word idiomatic expressions were presented to adult bilinguals proficient in Russian and English. Stimuli included phrases with idiomat- ic equivalents in both languages (e.g. “empty words/пycтыe cлoвa”) or in one language only (English—e.g. “empty suit/пycтoй кocтюм” or Russian—e.g. “empty sound/пycтoй звyк”), or in neither language (e.g. “empty rain/пycтoй (...) дoждь”). If idioms are stored in a language-specific format, then phrases with idiomatic equivalents in both languages would have dual representation, and should therefore be more easily recalled than phrases with idiomatic meaning in only one language. This result was obtained. As such, the findings support the dual-coding theory of memory and are also compatible with models of the bilingual lexicon that include language tags or nodes. (shrink)

First published in 1984, this is a study of categorization practices: how people categorize each other and their actions; how they describe, infer, and judge. The book presents a sociological analysis and description of practical activities and makes a cogent contribution to the study of how the moral order actually works in practical communicative contexts. Among the issues dealt with are: collectivity categorizations, the organization of lists and descriptions, moral attribution and inferences, and the relationship between standards of morality and (...) standards of rationality. (shrink)

Cities and local governments loom large on the sustainability agenda. Networks such as Fair Trade Towns International (FTT) and the Organic Cities Network aim to bring about global policy change from below. Given the new enthusiasm for local approaches, it seems relevant to ask to what extent local groups exercise power and in what form. City networks present their members as “ethical places” exercising _power with_, rather than _power over_ others. The article provides an empirical analysis of the power of (...) FTT and Organic Cities in Germany. In both cases, we found cities that are eager to emphasize their inclusive potential. Their willingness to compromise is demonstrated most illustratively by the fact that several cities are members of both networks: While the FTT campaign aims to address problems of international trade but does not abandon it, Organic Cities advocate for a new localism based on food supply from farmers in the same region. In both cases, city networks use their purchasing power to increase the share of certified products. By doing so, the city networks reproduce privileged positions of consumers benefitting from the global capitalist order (_power over_). However, our analysis revealed that networks also make citizens reflect upon agri-food challenges and allow developing alternatives for more sustainable systems (_power with_). (shrink)

This paper presents methodological reflections on power sharing and shifts of power in various interview situations. Narratives are said to be shaped by our attempts to position ourselves within social and cultural circumstances. In an interview situation, power can be seen as something that is created and that shifts between the interviewer and the interviewed. Reflexivity is involved when we as interviewers attempt to look at a situation or a concept from various perspectives. A modified form of discourse analysis inspired (...) by subject positioning was used to reflect on power relations in four different interview situations. The analyses indicate that reflection on the power relations can lead to other forms of understanding of the interviewee. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this study is that power relations are created within an interview situation and therefore it is important to be aware of dominant perspectives. Researchers and nurses face the challenge of constantly raising their level of consciousness about power relationships, and discursive reflexivity is one way of doing this. Thus, reflexivity is an important part of the qualitative research process. (shrink)

The present study examined the effects of mindfulness training on attention regulation in university students and whether the potential benefits of implementation are influenced by the yoga component of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) and/or by MBI homework practice. In a non-randomized trial with pre- and post-assessments, n = 180 university students were allocated to either mindfulness training (experimental groups), awareness activities (active control group), or no training (passive control group). Mindfulness was taught through two MBIs, one including yoga and the other (...) excluding yoga. Attention regulation was operationalized via behavioral indicators, namely sustained attention, cognitive flexibility, cognitive inhibition, and data-driven information processing. With the exception of speed in a cognitive flexibility task, the results indicated no systematic or differential advantage arising from mindfulness training, with or without yoga, regarding the aspects of attention regulation. There was no consistent influence of homework quantity or quality. The implications for mindfulness training in academic contexts are discussed. (shrink)

Emotional AI is an emerging technology used to make probabilistic predictions about the emotional states of people using data sources, such as facial (micro)-movements, body language, vocal tone or the choice of words. The performance of such systems is heavily debated and so are the underlying scientific methods that serve as the basis for many such technologies. In this article I will engage with this new technology, and with the debates and literature that surround it. Working at the intersection of (...) criminology, policing, surveillance and the study of emotional AI this paper explores and offers a framework of understanding the various issues that these technologies present particularly to liberal democracies. I argue that these technologies should not be deployed within public spaces because there is only a very weak evidence-base as to their effectiveness in a policing and security context, and even more importantly represent a major intrusion to people’s private lives and also represent a worrying extension of policing power because of the possibility that intentions and attitudes may be inferred. Further to this, the danger in the use of such invasive surveillance for the purpose of policing and crime prevention in urban spaces is that it potentially leads to a highly regulated and control-oriented society. I argue that emotion recognition has severe impacts on the right to the city by not only undertaking surveillance of existing situations but also making inferences and probabilistic predictions about future events as well as emotions and intentions. (shrink)

Hermeneutics and narration: a way to deal with qualitative data This article focuses a hermeneutic approach on the interpretation of narratives. It is based on the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's theory of interpretation but modified and used within a caring science paradigm. The article begins with a presentation of the theoretical underpinnings of hermeneutic philosophy and narration, as well as Ricoeur's theory of interpretation, before going on to describe the interpretation process as modified by the authors. The interpretation process, which (...) consists of several stages, is exemplified and discussed using a single case from a larger study on suffering. The results of that study indicate that the struggle of suffering is perceived as a struggle formed between shame and dignity, and that nurses must engage in the process of preserving and restoring the dignity of their suffering patients. The authors suggest that Ricoeur's theory of interpretation is useful when trying to understand narrative data if the researcher realises that the process of distanciation, although central in Ricoeur's thinking, is not the goal of the process but rather a means to deal with the researcher's pre‐understandings. According to Ricoeur, distanciation is accomplished by putting the context aside and dealing with the text ‘as text’ and thereby explaining its meaning. Explanation thus becomes the dialectic counterpart to understanding in the interpretation process. The researchers further argue that distanciation must be followed by reflection, where the interpretations are linked back to the empirical context. (shrink)

Two classes of account have been proposed to explain the memory processes subserving the processing of reflexive-antecedent dependencies. Structure-based accounts assume that the retrieval of the antecedent is guided by syntactic tree-configurational information without considering other kinds of information such as gender marking in the case of English reflexives. By contrast, unconstrained cue-based retrieval assumes that all available information is used for retrieving the antecedent. Similarity-based interference effects from structurally illicit distractors which match a non-structural retrieval cue have been interpreted (...) as evidence favoring the unconstrained cue-based retrieval account since cue-based retrieval interference from structurally illicit distractors is incompatible with the structure-based account. However, it has been argued that the observed effects do not necessarily reflect interference occurring at the moment of retrieval but might equally well be accounted for by interference occurring already at the stage of encoding or maintaining the antecedent in memory, in which case they cannot be taken as evidence against the structure-based account. We present three experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) on German reflexives and Swedish reflexive and pronominal possessives in which we pit the predictions of encoding interference and cue-based retrieval interference against each other. We could not find any indication that encoding interference affects the processing ease of the reflexive-antecedent dependency formation. Thus, there is no evidence that encoding interference might be the explanation for the interference effects observed in previous work. We therefore conclude that invoking encoding interference may not be a plausible way to reconcile interference effects with a structure-based account of reflexive processing. (shrink)

A growing body of work approaches the current environmental devastation from the perspective of a “crisis of sensitivity”: our inability to care for the living around us is said to be a failure of perception and feeling. The article explores several versions of the narrative of modern insensitivity through a study of Günther Anders and Jane Bennett, highlighting the limitations of such approaches. I suggest the notion of a desensitization apparatus to specify and politicize the diagnosis of a “crisis of (...) sensitivity”. (shrink)

Background Healthcare leader support and facilitation for ethics work are of great importance for healthcare professionals’ handling of ethical issues, moral distress, and quality care provision. A digital tool for ethical reflection in long-term care was developed in response to the demand for appropriate tools. Research aim This study aimed to explore healthcare leaders’ expectations of using a digital tool for ethical reflection among their home nursing care staff. Research design A qualitative research design with vignettes and focus group interviews (...) was used. The data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants and Research Context The sample comprised ten healthcare leaders from municipal long-term care in Norway. Ethical Considerations Participation was voluntary and based on informed consent. The Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research approved this study. Findings The analysis resulted in the development of three themes representing leaders’ expectations of the tool: (i) giving staff a voice, (ii) revealing ethics in practice, and (iii) keeping the pot boiling. Discussion Leaders must be informed about the ethical issues experienced to engage in supportive measures for their staff. Digital channels can increase the democratization, safety, and efficiency of communication between employees and leaders and increase awareness of ethical aspects in daily care work. The leaders had positive expectations of employees’ activities and benefits from using the tool for ethical reflection. However, they admitted that realizing the tool’s potential to ensure continuity in ethics work requires considerable organizational and leader involvement. Conclusions This study shows that healthcare leaders are open to digital solutions for managing ethics work in home nursing care. Both opportunities and important prerequisites for successfully implementing the digital tool were identified. (shrink)

Felicity Haynes earned Honours degrees in English and French literature from The University of Western Australia and completed her doctorate on reason and understanding at the University of Illinoi...

This article examines the structural power of domestic finance in developing and emerging economies in the context of a shift toward increasingly activist financial development planning and financial sector reform. Focusing on efforts to create large, internationally competitive banks in Malaysia and Nigeria dating to the late 1990s and early 2000s, it highlights that banks have not played their envisaged role in financing structural transformation via industrial growth and economic development. Nonetheless, banks in DEEs have attained considerable structural power over (...) financial policy, supporting their ability to shape growth and investment strategies. Therefore, the article proposes a revised model of the structural power of finance, recognizing its contingent nature. States pursue various forms of financialization both as a substitute to, or in conjunction with, industrial policy. Financialized development strategies enhance the structural power of large banks in DEEs, notwithstanding their limited role in meeting the investment/development imperative. (shrink)

Why should contemporary philosophers study philosophical texts of the past? Today, there are various answers to that question, but Bernard Williams was one of the first who has combined analytical and historical elements in his approach to it. Although several recent articles refer to Williams’ different remarks about the history of philosophy, his attitude has never been presented comprehensively. That desideratum will be fulfilled in this essay. In doing so, I will argue, firstly, that Williams rejects the position traditionally favoured (...) by analytical philosophers because of his very different understanding of philosophy and, secondly, that the three different methods he suggests for studying the history of philosophy are compatible with each other. (shrink)

Featuring contributions from the world’s leading experts on the subject and based partly on several detailed case studies, this volume is the first comprehensive analysis of the scientific notion of robustness as well as of the general ...

Our article examines how journalistic reports and online comments have made sense of computational politics. It treats the discourse around data-driven campaigns as its object of analysis and codifies four main perspectives that have structured the debates about the use of large data sets and data analytics in elections. We study American, British, and German sources on the 2016 United States presidential election, the 2017 United Kingdom general election, and the 2017 German federal election. There, groups of speakers maneuvered between (...) enthusiastic, skeptical, agnostic, or admonitory stances and so cannot be clearly mapped onto these four discursive positions. Coming along with the inconsistent accounts, public sensemaking was marked by an atmosphere of speculation about the substance and effects of computational politics. We conclude that this equivocality helped journalists and commentators to sideline prior reporting on the issue in order to repeatedly rediscover the practices they had already covered. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 19 Heft: 1 Seiten: 196-198.

Background Nurse leaders increasingly need effective tools that facilitate the prioritisation of ethics and help staff navigate ethical challenges and prevent moral distress. This study examined experiences with a new digital tool for ethical reflection, tailored to improve the capabilities of both leaders and employees in the context of municipal long-term care. Aim The aim was to explore the experiences of nurse leaders and nurses in using Digital Ethical Reflection as a tool for ethics work in home nursing care. Research (...) design The study employed a qualitative design, incorporating individual and focus group interviews for data collection. Qualitative content analysis was used to analyse the data. Participants and research context The participants comprised six nurse leaders and 13 nurses, representing six home care zones across two Norwegian municipalities. Ethical considerations The study involved informed, voluntary participation and was approved by the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research. Findings Four themes were developed: a constant walk on the edge between engagement and discouragement and lost in translation describe the process, while tuning in to the ethical dimension and navigating ethical uncertainties illuminate the experienced significance of Digital Ethical Reflection. Conclusion Success with Digital Ethical Reflection in home nursing care depends on clear leadership planning, nurses’ understanding of the tool’s purpose, and active use of digital registrations. Support from ethically interested nurses enhances overall engagement. Further research is needed to explore the potential of Digital Ethical Reflection as an additional tool in long-term care ethics work. (shrink)

What kinds of norms constrain mechanistic discovery and explanation? In the mechanistic literature, the norms for good explanations are directly derived from answers to the metaphysical question of what explanations are. Prominent mechanistic accounts thus emphasize either ontic or epistemic norms. Still, mechanistic philosophers on both sides agree that there is no sharp distinction between the processes of discovery and explanation. Thus, it seems reasonable to expect that ontic and epistemic accounts of explanation will be accompanied by ontic and epistemic (...) accounts of discovery, respectively. As we will show here, however, recent discovery accounts implicitly rely on both ontic and epistemic norms to characterize the discovery process. In this paper, we develop an account that makes explicit that, and how, ontic and epistemic norms work together throughout the discovery process. By describing mechanism discovery as a process of pattern recognition we demonstrate that scientists have to develop epistemic activities to distinguish a pattern from its background. Furthermore, they have to determine which epistemic activities successfully describe how the pattern is implemented by identifying the pattern’s components. Our approach reveals that ontic and epistemic norms are equally important in mechanism discovery. (shrink)

Lena Grezella widmet sich mit ihrem Buch der Utopie eines Diversity Managements in Organisationen des Jahres 2035 in Deutschland. In ihrem Text entwirft sie ein wünschenswertes Zukunftsbild, das mögliche und wahrscheinliche gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen in ihre umfassenden Betrachtungen einbezieht. Die Autorin greift im Rahmen eines qualitativen Forschungsdesigns auf Sachverständigenwissen zurück, um Erkenntnisse über das organisationale Diversity Management der Zukunft zu gewinnen. In den Ergebnissen beschreibt sie Veränderungen für organisationales Handeln und den Umgang mit Vielfalt bis in das Jahr 2035, aus (...) denen sich neue Handlungsfelder für das Diversity Management in Deutschland ergeben. Dabei zeigt die Autorin Vorstellungen über die zukünftige strukturelle Verankerung von Diversity Management sowie die Verantwortlichkeit für diversitybezogene Maßnahmen auf. Damit entwickelt sie ein zukunftsorientiertes Verständnis von Diversity Management und stellt die Merkmale vor, die organisationalen Umgang mit Vielfalt zukünftig ausmachen sollten. Die Autorin Lena Grezella arbeitet in einer Unternehmensberatung, die sich mit Projekt- und Prozessmanagement beschäftigt. Sie engagiert sich dort für soziale Nachhaltigkeit und interkulturelle Kompetenz. Nach ihrem Bachelorabschluss in Betriebswirtschaft und Wirtschaftspsychologie absolvierte sie einen Masterabschluss in Nachhaltigkeit und Systemischem Management, mit Schwerpunkt Diversity Management. (shrink)

This article explores morality and credibility struggles in connection to two officially sanctioned public Swedish experiments launched in the late 1960s to investigate the (ab)use of alcohol and illicit drugs, especially in relation to young people, and the subsequent decisions to terminate the experiments and research. We argue that these 1960s struggles on how to analyze the effects of increased availability of psychoactive substances must be understood in the light of a simultaneous development of modern (social) science studies. The public (...) display of conflicting expert views on how to investigate and interpret questions of alcohol and drugs in modern society played out in concordance with the growth of social science alcohol and drug research and expertise. The article focuses on the 1960s, a decade that was characterized by profound transformations in Swedish society. In so doing, the article contributes from the perspective of history to debates on the nexus between knowledge production and policy in modern societies. (shrink)

This article argues that theorists of black/african diasporas should interrogate the specific ways in which ‘race’ is used to engage people in diasporic projects, and that such projects are intimately intertwined with specifically gendered, sexualized, and generational class relations and positionalities in specific national contexts and spaces. Attention to these intersections can help us better understand hierarchies of power between and among diasporic individuals and communities. This article focuses on historically specific Swedish meanings of racialized femininities and the different forms (...) of agency women use to negotiate the gendered processes of racialization they encounter in a variety of settings and sources. It draws on interviews and fieldnotes conducted between 1994 and 2007, together with analysis of popular culture (music and radio programmes) and ethnographic material collected by Swedish ethnologist Viveca Motsieloa, and maps out some of the complexities utilized by different generations of Swedish women of African heritage in a changing Swedish landscape of racial formations. Their negotiations show how tensions and differences between ‘second-generation’ migrants and those of the ‘first generation’ are expressed through gender, sexuality, and differing understandings of ‘race’ (and the place of ‘racial mixture’). (shrink)

For centuries, scholars have not doubted that Macrobio Ambrogio Teodosio was pagan. Recently, prof. Alan Cameron in his The Last Pagans of Rome clamied that the late antique writer was actually a Christian. This essay seeks to refute this assumption. --Translated from back cover.

I defend one way of solving the Impermissibility Problem—that is, the problem that on moralized approaches to coercion, coerciveness and permissibility are mutually exclusive. This brings up intuitive difficulties for cases such as taxation, which seem to be both coercive and permissible. I gloss three popular theories of coercion—the moralized baseline, nonmoralized baseline, and enforcement approaches—and conclude that only the nonmoralized baseline approach clearly solves the problem. However, Robert Nozick’s famous “slave case” raises another serious issue for the nonmoralized baseline (...) approach. So, in order to solve both the slave case and the Impermissibility Problem, I draw on Grant Lamond’s discussion of the coerciveness of law to propose the pro tanto wrong approach. On this approach, coercion is not impermissible simpliciter, but requires some sort of special justification. The pro tanto wrong approach is moralized, but on it, moralization comes in coercion’s need for justification, not in whether it is, in fact, justified. Thus impermissibility is neither necessary nor sufficient for coerciveness, and the Impermissibility Problem is avoided. I conclude that solving the problem in this way is desirable because it preserves a core belief of liberalism: certain acts, including taxation, may be both coercive and permissible. (shrink)

People typically remember emotionally negative words better than neutral words. Two experiments are reported that investigate whether emotionally enhanced memory for negatively arousing words is based on a storage or retrieval advantage. Participants studied non-word–word pairs that either involved negatively arousing or neutral target words. Memory for these target words was tested by means of a recognition test and a cued-recall test. Data were analysed with a multinomial model that allows the disentanglement of storage and retrieval processes in the present (...) recognition-then-cued-recall paradigm. In both experiments the multinomial analyses revealed no storage differences between negatively arousing and neutral words but a clear retrieval advantage for negatively arousing words in the cued-recall test. These findings suggest that EEM for negatively arousing words is driven by associative processes. (shrink)

This study aims to disentangle complexity from randomness and chaos, and to present a definition of complexity that emphasizes its epistemically distinct qualities. I will review existing attempts at defining complexity and argue that these suffer from two major faults: a tendency to neglect the underlying dynamics and to focus exclusively on the phenomenology of complex systems; and linguistic imprecisions in describing these phenomenologies. I will argue that the tendency to discuss phenomenology removed from the underlying dynamics is the main (...) root of the difficulties in distinguishing complex from chaotic or random systems. In my own definition, I will explicitly try to avoid these pitfalls. The theoretical contemplations in this paper will be tested on a sample of five models: the random Kac ring, the chaotic CA30, the regular CA90, the complex CA110 and the complex Bak-Sneppen model. Although these modelling studies are restricted in scope and can only be seen as preliminary, they still constitute on of the first attempts to investigate complex systems comparatively. (shrink)

The ethics of belief is concerned with the question of what we should believe. According to evidentialism, what one should believe is determined by evidence only. Pragmatism claims that practical considerations too can be relevant. But pragmatism comes in two shapes. According to a more traditional version, practical considerations can provide practical reasons for or against belief. According to a new brand of pragmatism, pragmatic encroachment, practical considerations can affect positive epistemic status, such as epistemic rationality or knowledge. In the (...) literature, the distinction between the two versions of pragmatism is not always made. If it is mentioned, it is quickly put aside. Sometimes, it is simply overlooked. As evidentialists face two distinct pragmatist challenges, they must get clearer on the distinction. But it matters for pragmatists too. As I see it, if one accepts one version of pragmatism, one should reject the other. This paper’s goals are to get clearer on the distinction and argue that both pragmatisms are independent. Accepting one version does not commit one to accept the other. Moreover, even if both pragmatisms tend to be neutral toward one another, I will argue that traditional pragmatism has good reasons to reject pragmatic encroachment and vice versa. (shrink)

This book is devoted to applied ethics. We focus on six popular and controversial topics: abortion, the environment, animals, poverty, punishment, and disability. We cover three chapters per topic, and each chapter is devoted to a famous or influential argument on the topic. After we present an influential argument, we then consider objections to the argument, and replies to the objections. The book is impartial, and set up in order to equip the reader to make up her own mind about (...) the controversial topics covered. (shrink)

The Groningen Protocol aims at providing guidance in end-of-life decision-making for severely impaired newborns. Since its publication in 2005 many bioethicists and health care professionals have written articles in response. However, only very little is known about the opinion among the general population on this subject. The aim of this study was to present the general attitude towards neonatal euthanasia (NE) among the Austrian population and the factors associated with the respondents’ opinion.